2nd September 2015, Monthly Memorial,
Night Office
Second Reading
A Reading about the Resurrection of the Dead
(From
a Sermon by St. Augustine.)
If you take away faith in the
resurrection of the dead, all Christian teaching falls to the ground. But even should
our faith be founded on the resurrection of the dead, the Christian soul is not
then secure, unless we distinguish between the life that is to come and that
which passes away.
But you are sorrowful because of your
dear one who is buried; because you do not now hear his voice. He lived; he
died. He ate, he does not now eat. He felt and saw; now he feels nothing. The
joys and pleasures of the living are now nothing to him.
But, do you mourn for the seed when you
plough the earth? Let us suppose there was someone so ignorant of things, that
when he bore the seed to the fie1d and cast it upon the earth and buried it in
the broken soil; suppose there was someone so ignorant of the way of nature,
even of things close at hand, that, thinking of the departed summer, he mourns
for the wheat, saying to himself: 'This wheat, now buried in the earth, with
what toil was it harvested, and carried from the field, threshed upon the
harvest floor, winnowed, stored in the barn! We saw its beauty, and rejoiced
and gave thanks. Now it is taken from our eyes. I see the ploughed 1 and; but
the wheat I see neither here nor in the barn!” Sorrowfully he would mourn the
wheat as dead and buried; he would weep freely, his thoughts on the field, on the
earth, but seeing no more the harvest.
And what would they say to him, those
who were not ignorant of these matters? Supposing had wept in this way they
would say to him: 'Do not grieve. What we buried in the earth is indeed no
longer in the barn, no longer in our hands. But soon we shall go again to the field,
and you will be happy in the beauty of the growing corn, where now you weep
over the nakedness of ploughed earth. And he who now 1 earns what s ha 11 come
from the sown wheat, he too will rejoice in the p1oughing and the sowing. He
who had been unbelieving, or rather, who had been foolish and without
experience, may perhaps have mourned before, but believing those who have
experienced, he will go away comforted, and wait in hope for the harvest to
come.
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